Clark Blaise: The Interviews

Part of the Myth:

An Interview with Clark Blaise

[1992]

J . R . ( T i m ) S t r u t h e r s

TS: There’s an old saying that you have to give a little to get a little. So here’s a bit of a gift. My father was born in Sarnia, Ontario. He lost a twin brother at birth.

CB: Identical?

TS: I don’t know. Sometime afterwards, he was put up for adoption and taken in by a couple who lived in Winnipeg — where your mother lived intermittently, including her college years and her final years. A little later, when his sister was born, she was taken in by the same family in Winnipeg. Yet the details of my father’s birth and adoption and childhood remained unknown to me, or at least unaccepted by me, until after I myself became a father — through falling in love, upon her arrival to do Ph D. work like me at Western, with Marianne Micros, then recently widowed and the mother of a nearly five-year-old daughter, Eleni Alexandra Kapetanios. Interestingly, Eleni is now, in 1992-93, a fourthyear Creative Writing and English student at Concordia University in the very program in which you taught for a dozen years before leaving Montreal in 1978. So it wasn’t until after, and in terms of some matters well after, Marianne and Eleni entered my life in September 1974 — the same month that I met Alice Munro, when she came to Western to serve as writer-in-residence for a year — that certain very important details of my father’s life became known to me. And indeed, many details of my father’s life are unknown to me, or at least undeciphered by me, even now.

I recall my mother telling me, when I was a teenager, that my father was adopted. At the time, I thought my mother was criticizing him in some way to me. But she may have meant something entirely different. Perhaps she was trying to explain something about him to me and I misunderstood her intention completely. But I didn’t trust the information at the time. Moreover, I don’t think I ever heard it from his own lips. And I only accepted it as fact when I learned from Marianne that he had told this to Eleni and to her. I believe my father was trying to offer Eleni some emotional support since her first father had died after an automobile accident when she was not quite thirteen months old. I believe my father wanted Eleni to have confidence that our new family would work — and would continue to work when we became a family of four with the birth of our younger daughter, Joy, in 1978 — and he decided it might be reassuring to tell Eleni about his success adjusting to changes during his own childhood.

My father died on November 25th, 1991, at the age of seventy-nine, died happily after a fairly short illness. He had played eighteen holes of golf the day before he became ill and was sick at home and in hospital for only five and a half weeks. So he lived a long and hardy and devoted life. A few months earlier, we had played a round of golf together on his birthday, August 19th, at a course on the Bluewater Highway immediately north of Bayfield, Ontario. I’d just finished my summer teaching — my schedule at the University of Guelph includes winter and summer teaching, then the fall for research — and as we were walking down the first fairway together after hitting our drives I told him that I’d recently received a letter from the Dean of Arts thanking me for my past year’s work and advising me of my salary for the coming year. My dad was overjoyed: I’d achieved the success — by which he would have meant the security and the salary — that he had dreamed of my achieving. I appreciated the pride that he felt in me, yet there was much more that I still didn’t know about him. It was only after he died that I learned he had been a twin. And it was only after he died that I learned his birth name. I was forty-one years old at the time. His birth certificate gave his father’s and mother’s surnames as Jones and Smith. His birth name, Harry Jones, struck me as pure invention. Or maybe you could say part joke and part invention.

Some of my favourite memories of my father are from his days with Trans-Canada Air Lines, later renamed Air Canada, which he joined in 1947, the company’s eleventh year. He spent twenty-three years, all in London, Ontario, working for the company. And for many years, right up to his forced retirement in 1970 at age fifty-seven — Air Canada having elected to cut, if I remember correctly, three hundred executives from coast to coast — he held the top position, locally, as District Sales Manager. So my father, like yours, was a salesman — though I actually think of him more as someone who gave his life to public service. And I, like you, am a salesman’s son. And also, like you, an only child, an only son.

As a kid, in the 1950s, I would ask my father to take me down to the CPR station in London, Ontario because I liked to watch the trains come in. This proved to be quite comic because men would come up to my dad and say, Well, if it isn’t Jack Struthers. What are you doing here? Couldn’t you get the planes off the ground today? And I can remember my dad on innumerable occasions introducing himself with a big smile and a firm handshake and saying, Hi, I’m Jack, or else just giving his name, Jack Struthers He wasn’t Jack by birth, he wasn’t Jack Struthers, but that’s certainly what he became.

What I’m getting to, what I want to tell you, is how deeply I was moved by a passage from the closing segment of autobiography in Resident Alien that describes your mother’s family and the traits particularly of the men in her family. You’re talking about Winnipeg and you say, Right now, it is still a hard, Siberian winter day. Winnipeg should not exist, except as an urban planner’s act of defiance, an experiment on the heartless Russian model. Yet it does exist, like Edmonton exists, like Montreal exists, and the effects of that anomaly — the intense communalism, the isolation, the pride, the shame and absurdity of carrying on normal life at forty below zero — create a population of stubborn, sceptical survivalists, hungry for recognition and certification, a people born with the ache of anonymity and the conviction that they’ll always have something to prove. All of which leads to that bone-proud prairie loneliness, the suspicion of anyone who’s had it easier — east, west, or south. In my mother’s family, self-reliance was a creed; bottled-up and bitten-back, no grief was exposed, no help asked for, though none was refused.

My father didn’t explain much to me about his background, didn’t explain much to me about Winnipeg, for example — though once or twice when I was still a kid we did spend a day or so there when my father took me north for a week to a friend’s fishing lodge on Waterbury Lake in northern Saskatchewan. Something that I’m sure you would appreciate based on your own experiences of going fishing with your father. And my father may have pointed out various things about himself to me then, and on other travels together, that I was too young to interpret, or perhaps even too young to recognize as important, things that I seem to have forgotten. But I wanted to mention these details, these correspondences, in order to convey the depth to which that passage of yours struck home for me, in order to suggest how much it explained about my father’s attitudes and conceivably some of mine.

Another bit of synchronicity between us is that when my dad was still a boy — in the early to mid-1920s I suppose — his father took his family to live for a short time in Florida. I know nothing about this. And my only knowl edge of the American South — other than a tourist’s view of Florida that I acquired when my parents and I flew down there a couple of times for a short vacation while I was very young, then later when Marianne and I drove down there once for a few days at Christmastime the year we met — has come through reading Southern writers, in which company, in some respects, I would include you. I know that you spent a hugely formative period, roughly from age six to age ten, living in north-central Florida during the mid- to late 1940s. I was wondering if you would describe the sense that you formed then, the sense that you carry now, of that landscape — the importance of that landscape to you as an artist.

CB: First of all, what you say about your own background and Winnipeg and the feeling that your father disguised himself in a sense all of his life seems to me to be part of the myth that is enacted between fathers and sons universally. I can think of no father who really confesses the important things of his life to his son. So that even a father who was seemingly in essence a good father, a warm and supportive father, has withheld from you the vital statistics of his life — his name, his origins — as did my father. So that in a sense every son has to invent his own father, every son is left with this void of who his father really was. Part of it is shame because no father wants to tell his son of the women, the world, that pre-existed his son’s birth. And part of it is the son’s feeling that the father didn’t really exist before he came along anyway, that the father is not allowed to have a life before he became a father, when he was just another guy knocking around.

The myth of Canada and Florida is, I think, easy to explain. These are the attractions of polar opposites, quite literally polar opposites, North to South — in my case also compounded by French to English. We love and fear, are attracted to and repulsed by, those forces that we consider to be opposite to our own. We feel somehow that we can draw strength from them.

I clearly am my mother’s son and yet, while not rejecting her and her background, I find, as you can see even from the part that you read from Resident Alien, they are alien people to me. I am not at all part of their self-reliance and their hardiness and their pride and their isolation and their defiant impregnability. I’m not that at all and I’m not attracted to those kinds of people. Even as much as I might admire them, I’m not attracted to them particularly. And as much as I love and respect my mother, or the memory of my mother and what she went through and what she survived, I feel that her very quality of survival was really her greatest weakness. Her strength was her weakness. The fact that she was so obviously capable of surmounting difficulty almost guaranteed that she would be given a huge helping of disaster in her life. Catastrophe stalked her, largely because she could prove that she could surmount it so often. Her life became an evidentiary show of her ability to survive.

My mother told me everything about herself. I think there’s really nothing from her life that she left secret. It was all laid out for me. I had all the tools, all the details. She was a wonderful storyteller. And she told me all the stories of her life. My father told me nothing, nothing at all, including his earlier marriages, his name, his upbringing. If I’d known anything about any part of his life, I think it would have unravelled him as a person because I would have started asking him questions. Sooner or later the whole terrible history of French Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, his marriages, his brutality, his divorces, his women would have all come tumbling out and it would probably have been horrendous.

So I think it’s true that your story, while it’s dramatic and illustrative, and my story, while it’s dramatic and illustrative, are probably no different, except in the more lurid colours, from the stories of most boys and their fathers of our generation or of the generation immediately afterwards. I think now, with the prevailing ethos of male vulnerability and friendliness and openness and all these things that are probably the result of the new kinds of child-raising techniques, perhaps that world of mysteries might be a little bit less available, or less inevitable.

Certainly I come from a generation of people who were secret to the world, and in many ways to themselves, and who could not share even the first level of intimacy. All the desire for intimacy, or the desire to explain oneself, then, took the form only of sexuality, or of criminality in my father’s case, or of aggressive salesmanship, so that he was in a sense saying to the people he sold furniture to, his customers, not Do you want a sofa? but Who am I? Tell me who I am. Confirm to me, by buying this sofa, that I exist

TS: It was his work and his ambitions that took you down to Florida.

CB: Well, I think in an overt way it was. But I think in a covert way it was something else. His ambitions took him as far south as Atlanta in 1946. He quit Sears, which had been his employer for eight years in various parts of the States — North Dakota, where I was born, and Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Sears did not give much money at all as a salary, but it did have a very generous parting package. So he took his accumulated money from eight years’ wartime service to Sears and invested immediately in a little showroom he started in Atlanta which failed within a very short time. Then he was obliged to go back on the road as a travelling salesman and the only territory that opened up for him was in Florida. Florida at that time was not an attractive place to be. Florida was the back of beyond in some ways in the mid-forties, especially since he was not allowed to do any selling in the territory of Jacksonville or Miami or Tampa. He was given south Georgia, south Alabama, and north Florida.

And so he simply established himself. I don’t know how it came about that he established himself in Leesburg, Florida, but that’s where he rented a little secondfloor-rear apartment in a small Southern town in 1947. That was the first place I remember with real vividness. I was back there just a few months ago giving a reading at the University of Central Florida, which is in Orlando — it’s a fairly new university — and the professor who had invited me, Anna Lillios, and I went back to Leesburg where I was able to point out to her every single building, every single street.

We went to the very house that I had lived in and talked to the people who are living in it now. The street has not changed. It has been paved, but other than that it hasn’t changed. The houses are exactly as they were — typical Florida thirties or twenties construction, with screened-in porches and bungalows on stilts and everyone keeping hound dogs tied up against the stilts. And there was an old toothless woman with a big chaw of tobacco in her mouth, reading, if she could read — I don’t remember if she was reading, maybe she was listening, maybe she was being read to by her grandchild — out on the very porch that I as a kid had lain on. I was asking her about the names of people. I remembered vividly all the names of all the people in all the little houses. And she kept going back, saying, Well, I been here since 1953 and ain’t never seen nothin’ like that here And I would say to her, Well, I was here in 1947 She may have looked the role of the Big Mama from Florida and she may have looked like and sounded like a typical Florida Cracker but actually I pre-dated her there and I was the Cracker if anyone was.

And the professor who was with me was so amused that I was telling this old remnant of the Old South more things about her neighbourhood than she knew. She was denying them. But I said, "No, if you go back there, you’ll find there’s an old fish pond that has obviously now been filled in, and this particular laundry house in the back is where my mother had her spontaneous abortion that I wrote about in my novel Lunar Attractions. You know, in the sense that I own this land out of memory and blood more than you do In the Faulknerian sense. Even though you’ve been living here unbrokenly for forty years, I was here forty-five years ago."

TS: A more general question has to do with the entirety of a writer’s inheritance. You’ve been speaking about your family inheritance — on your mother’s side, English Canadian from Western Canada, and on your father’s side, French-Canadian from Quebec. Something else that I’m interested in is the inheritance you gained from your formal education. As an undergraduate you studied geology, didn’t you?

CB: Geology and English and religion, as a matter of fact. I could have taken a degree in either English or geology, depending on the comprehensive exam. I had the hours for either. Since the trend in my life at the time was towards English and away from science, I chose to do my comprehensive exam in English and not geology.

TS: That’s very interesting. To use a geological metaphor, however, what I’m wondering about more broadly are the various layers of a writer’s inheritance. But maybe layers isn’t exactly the right metaphor. Maybe something spread out in space would be better. Specifically, what I want to ask is how you as a writer, and a teacher of creative writing, would describe a writer’s inheritance: a writer’s family inheritance and geographical landscape, any religious beliefs that have come down through a writer’s upbringing, any literary influences derived from a writer’s formal education and personal reading, any cultural influences in later life — through marriage, for example. You married a Bengaliborn woman, Bharati Mukherjee. I married an American woman of Greek descent. I’m wondering how you would describe the different dimensions — maybe that’s the word I want — of a writer’s inheritance.

CB: Well, that’s really the subject of the book I have coming out in the spring of 1993, called I Had a Father, which is trying to deal with the whole bundle of Quebec and Catholicism and the dark mysterious forces of death and doom and fatalism and Jansenism. And all of that obviously formed my father and, by extension, formed a lot of myself. Because I’m also trying to deal with the genetic impulse of a son who never really knew his father, nevertheless growing older and realizing that he is enacting the father’s life almost helplessly. I don’t know if it’s inherited. In fact, I have a riff on the word inheritance I have a paragraph where I quote a Thoreau line, Books are the treasured wealth of the world, the fit inheritance of generations and nations And I talk about the word inheritance having a kind of dual nature — that is, it’s both what comes down to you and what you leave behind. So inheritance is one of those forward-looking, backward-looking, Janus-like words. I don’t know what an inheritance is. It’s as much what I leave behind as what I have picked up.

The image I use is not of layers, the metaphor I use is not of layers, it’s from astronomy: the idea that we who could train our telescopes on the planet Neptune at the turn of the twentieth century, studying the orbit of Neptune, knew that there was something out there beyond Neptune that was causing what they called a perturbation in the orbit of Neptune. In other words, we knew where it was, we knew how big it was, but we couldn’t see it because we didn’t have the technology, the light-gathering devices. So I say in this book that we knew the geography of ontogeny but we didn’t yet see it and it wasn’t until the technology or the statistics or the documentation came in that we were able to find Pluto. And so Pluto completes the cast of characters of the solar system.

In many ways that’s how I think of parents. They are the things that perturb your own orbit and make you not quite the smooth, friction-free, spinning orb in the universe that you would like to be. Instead you have gravitational affinities that you cannot explain or cannot escape. It’s because they are out there, the dark stars of your parentage or of your inheritance, bumping you out of a smooth orbit.

TS: Are there consolations in this? [Laughter ] CB: Constellations or consolations? [Laughter ] I think perhaps the main consolation is that you realize that you are only such things as they made you. You are born with the illusion of being free and being able to create your own life and being utterly your own agent in the world. And you realize as you grow older and older that you were never free and that the tribe, the language, the country, the culture you were born into, however much you define yourself against them, are in fact what define you. Whether you conform to their expectations or fight against them, it doesn’t matter: you are them.

In the case of a son, he almost inevitably becomes the father — no matter how much he had fought against the father, no matter how much he had defined himself against the father. I don’t know a single man my age who has lost his father years before who wouldn’t want him back, who doesn’t miss the connection. No matter how much they fought, or how little they had in common, that relationship is the vital one in their lives. So that’s a consolation.

Another consolation, I suppose, is simply that it doesn’t matter how ragged or how imperfect the relationship was. Age will in some way perfect it and in fact will make you more or less identical to the father. And I suppose the sad thing is that it doesn’t matter how good your relationship was. Age will in a sense darken it, age will roughen it up a bit. If the relationship was a perfect image of father-son solidarity in wonderful communal wholeness, the son will break away. If the relationship was a ragged and fractured one, the son will heal it TS: You seem equally capable of rendering that sort of archetypal situation between father and son as a horrifying scene in fiction and as a delightful scene in fiction. To me, one of your most moving descriptions is the long paragraph at the end of the title story of your first book, A North American Education, where Frankie Thibidault sits with his father for an hour on a bench at a beach in Florida, with a hurricane breaking offshore, after his mother has returned to the car. CB: What a day it was, what a once-in-a-lifetime day it was

TS: Yes. And in this context, it seems to me, it would also be interesting to look at a couple of scenes from your autobiographical writing. In Tenants of Unhousement, the long essay or memoir which you published in The Iowa Review in 1982 and which you told me you had hoped to include with related material in Resident Alien, you describe a scene at Lac Mégantic in Quebec, the one scene your father revealed to you from his past. CB: His father skating out on Lac Mégantic with his arms out in the buffalo robe.

TS: Yes. And somehow — in terms of positive father-son scenes — I connect this with the wonderful passage, in the opening segment of autobiography in Resident Alien, in which you describe your mentor, Bernard Malamud, coming down to Boston to the bookstore where you worked for several months before starting your MFA at Iowa.

CB: Signing his books and saying, A deposit on Blaise’s freedom.

TS: . for the afternoon Then taking you out for a walk.

Certainly I find interviews to be, for myself, very much that sort of special occasion. In a way I dread them in that I doubt whether I’m going to be well enough prepared. I think that despite all my years of study of the writer’s work, and my love for the writer’s work, I will arrive with far too modest knowledge and understanding. But I also live for interviews. And I think that they are among the best moments of my intellectual and my personal life.

The Sense of an Authentic Randomness:

An Interview with Clark Blaise

[1988]

C a t h e r i n e  S h e l d r i c k  R o s s

CSR: Because I am writing a biocritical introduction to your papers held in Special Collections at The University of Calgary Libraries, I am interested in the biographical aspect of your work. Perhaps you can help me by filling in some gaps. One is your mother.

CB: She died last year, 1987, on February 5th I think it was, in Winnipeg.

CSR: I got the feeling from the story Meditations on Starch, which you read last night at the conference on the Canadian short story Tim Struthers is hosting here in Guelph, that your mother was a much stronger presence in that story than she had been allowed to be in some of the others.

CB: I wanted to do justice to her, to the extraordinary person she was. I think I was feeling very strongly the full terrors of Alzheimer’s disease. For someone who had seen as much of the century as she had and who had absorbed so much of it — to see that all of that is lost. There is not a more profound loss in the universe than blown brain cells, which is what happens to people with Alzheimer’s. It’s the cruellest parody of loss for a person who asserted her independence against a very strong and patriarchal family and simply demanded that she be independent and worked so hard to achieve it and did all of the things that are not permissible. To see that she became nothing — there’s the tragedy of that which I felt someone had to demark. And I also feel that it’s probably going to be my fate as well CSR: There’s a similar theme in Resident Alien CB: There I took on the disease of epilepsy, which I don’t have. I wanted to give a very provisional sense of sanity or health.

CSR: You were saying last night that the book you would like to write next is the one in which identity is stripped back, layer by layer. That is really the process of Alzheimer’s disease.

CB: Yes. Right. You just keep falling from ledges. You’re on a plateau for a bit and you fall off that plateau and back and back and back.

CSR: Your mother was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan?

CB: No. Wawanesa, Manitoba. But North Battleford was part of her childhood. Her family went from Wawanesa to North Battleford.

CSR: Could you give me a quick sketch of what she did, because I think I have a lot of gaps there.

CB: She was born in Wawanesa. Her father was the town doctor and he was a horse breeder and also a fruit breeder. He was in the first class of the University of Manitoba medical school. His father was born in England and came to Canada as a child. He left Kincardine, Ontario and went west to be a master carpenter and work on the houses of parliament in Winnipeg. Much of the interior of the Manitoba parliament was done by him.

So my mother was born in Wawanesa, a tiny little town on the Souris River, south of Brandon near the North Dakota and Saskatchewan borders. Those were my mother’s most pleasant memories. She was the eldest of ten children. There were two boys and one died in infancy.

There have been many tributes written about my grandfather. He was a very famous man. I have a few of them framed at home because he was very much The Canadian Century and embodied the best of that breed. He became President of Wawanesa Mutual. He was the man who took it from prairie co-op into national insurance company 

CSR: And his name was Vanstone.

CB: Yes. Charles Morley Vanstone. There were a number of little towns that they lived in where he had a medical practice. But it was horse breeding that he really loved — the importing of Clydesdales and selling them to American farmers. That was what made him very wealthy.

Then when the Depression came, it destroyed him. By age fifty or so, he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to his breeders in Scotland. That’s when he went into Wawanesa Mutual as Chief Executive Officer and brought it around and brought himself around and once again became a prosperous person. He was a man of rectitude and honour.

I never knew him. His Alzheimer’s disease had taken him totally away by the time I saw him. I saw him frequently, but he never knew who I was or who my mother was or who he was. He was just this tyrannical figure running around the house in Winnipeg.

CSR: You give an image of this figure in Resident Alien CB: Yes. Underlining newspapers. It was a tragic thing, because my mother was more attached to him than to any person, aside from myself, in her life.

My mother went to Wesley College, what is now the University of Winnipeg, and graduated in 1927 in art — in art teaching. Her father absolutely forbade any kind of artistic career. So she worked for three years teaching in prairie towns: Guernsey, Saskatchewan and Dauphin, Manitoba and Minnedosa, Manitoba — places that sound like a Margaret Laurence story. She had some pictures of the main street of Guernsey, Saskatchewan that would break your heart.

Then in 1930 she said, I’m going to Europe to be an artist and by that time he couldn’t stop her. She was twenty-seven years old and she went to Germany. She was there in Dresden and Dessau. She was studying design in Dresden and making frequent trips to Dessau to audit classes at the Bauhaus. To me it’s an extraordinary thought that she was this girl from prairie Canada in the midst of the Bauhaus studying interior design with high functional modernism. Also at the same time she was drawing those heavily ornamental German cathedral doors and Dresden pottery and Meissen ware and porcelains that come out of that area of now East Germany — Leipzig-Dresden, that area.

She was there in 1933 when Hitler came to power. She fled, like everyone else in that school, and went to Prague, where she lived for a year by doing sketching and models for fashion design. Then she went to London where she worked for two years as a fashion designer before being called back to Montreal to be head decorator at Eaton’s. In 1937 she came to Eaton’s and that’s how she ran into my father, who was a furniture salesman on the floor.

CSR: The word accident comes to mind. I get the sense that a lot of your stories are about accident. It’s a resonant word in your work.

CB: Yes. How else can I put it? I want to write a fiction which is sufficiently broad to contain random, chaotic, accidental qualities. There’s nothing more moving in fiction to me than the sense of an authentic randomness. I want to create a fiction that is sufficiently broad so that it can contain the notion of all of the accidents and contradictability that are part of life itself. If I can do that, I’ll be happy. My own life has not at all been a series of predictable turns.

CSR: When I think about your work, even the novels read to me like short stories. Yet from what you’re saying, you have an interest in doing novels. You’re not like, say, Alice Munro, who tried to write novels and then said, I guess I’m not a novelist. I’ll do short stories or interlocked stories You have an interest still in the novel CB: For me, the short story is an expansionist form, not a miniaturizing form. To me, the novel is a miniaturizing form. I think of the story as the largest, most expanded statement you can make about a particular incident. I think of the novel as the briefest thing you can say about a larger incident. I think of the novel as being far more miniaturist — it’s a miniaturization of life. And short fiction is an expansion of a moment.

CSR: So you want to be able to keep writing both those forms.

CB: I would like to keep both those options open CSR: We’ve been talking a bit about accident. One of the themes that I keep coming across in reading your stories is that moment when the character discovers that his name is not what he thought it was. He thought it was Porter but it’s Carrier. He thought it was Desjardins.

but it’s Gardner. In your case it was..

CB: From Blais to Blaise.

CSR: Was this in fact a striking moment for you, the way it was for your characters?

CB: No. Well, I think it probably was. Yes. It seems to me like an entirely different universe — Blais as opposed to Blaise. Blais does look truncated and, in a sense, inexpressible: Bluh, Bleh, Blah. There are all sorts of possible variants in pronunciation. I regretted not being able to claim myself as part of that community of Blais — the pages after pages after pages in the Montreal phone book of the very commonest French-Canadian name. The only Blaises were Max and Rudi, the two Swiss-German Protestant Blaises. I wasn’t part of their world either. In New York, there are a lot of Blaises and they’re all Haitians — French West Indian names CSR: But it does come back to the business of identity CB: Yes. Of